The narrator’s second creation is Marla Singer. Marla acts as the Superego portion
of the unconscious by representing society’s views of the narrator’s actions. The narrator
alienates her and society as a whole from his true self and allows her access to his created
alter ego as a defense mechanism. In comparison with Tyler, Marla is connected to the
narrator’s empathy and feeling. She is more closely related to the narrator through the
support group community and shares his feelings of guilt and remorse. As the sole female
character, Marla represents the narrator’s feminine side and through his terrible treatment
of her shows his lack of understand of this part of him.
In Freudian psychology’s dream interpretation, dreams are the desires of the
unconscious and posits that both the manifest content and latent content are worthy of
exploration. Freud suggested that the unconscious self maintains access to memories from
the previous few days as “day residue”. Based on this anticipation the dreamers would
have a sense of errands to do after he or she awakes (Modell, 2012). He also conveyed
that some dreams access latent content, which are primarily permanent memories devel-
oped from childhood experience (Modell, 2012).
As a symptom or accessory to this Dissociative Identity Disorder, our protagonist
also experiences a serious amnesia, which is identified as dissociative amnesia in psychia-
try terms. Studies have shown that patients who possesses this characteristic often had
problems recalling their demeanor or other information about their past, since they have
blurred their autobiographical memory and even personal identity (Squire, 2008). In most
cases, this amnesia is caused by a history of severe childhood physical or emotional
trauma (Squire, 2008). Fight Club mentions little about the protagonist’s childhood memo-
ries, but it did imply the cause of his parent’s divorce made him hate to send messages in
the same way as Tyler asks him to send messages to Marla. This might be one of the
factors that caused his disorder.
Modell demonstrates in his article that “there are levels of dreamlike unconscious
processing of meaning that occur in the absence of conscious awareness.” By viewing the
text as a dream, we could fit ourselves into the protagonist’s shoes and imitate the views
for himself and his created world. With these spirits, we can view Tyler’s appearance in an
innovative perspective. When the protagonist experiences amnesia every time, his identity
falls asleep and Tyler awakes. Although the original identity “passed out”, his uncon-
sciousness links to Tyler, and created the so-called “unconscious self”, as known as the